Education for Peace

This past few weeks in Waterloo Region we've been celebrating International Days of Peace and Non violence. These activities have been brought together by community organisations who wish to recognise the importance of creating peace in the world through celebrations, fundraising, and sharing teachings on peace and non violence. The dates were chosen because September 21st is the International day of Peace and October 2nd, the International day for non violence; both which are globally recognised events celebrated around the world. I was particularly touched by the Equinox celebration at the Conscious Traveler, where First Nations teachers and musicians from all backgrounds shared messages of universal love and awakening. It was a very powerful experience.

I wanted to take this time after the success of these events to reflect on the importance of education for peace. One of the Elders at the Equinox celebration shared with us his understanding that as one person turns towards a life of conscious living in love and peacefulness, everyone around them is impacted in a ripple effect that spreads from individual to community to nation. We have so few examples in North America of people truly walking every step of their path in peace and love that this teaching is a difficult one to understand for those who have not been blessed as I have to witness and learn from such Conscious travelers, if I may borrow the term here. So let me share my understanding of what I believe is the gift of education for peace.

One of my former teachers at Wilfrid Laurier University, professor Adam Davidson Harden (the same Davidson-Harden of adamdavidsonharden.blogspot.com) shares that his understanding of the challenge of education for peace is its essential aim to teach empathy for others, even globally remote others, as key to changing a cultural awareness away from violence towards the pursuit of peace. While I agree with this key point, I also want to expand on it. As we come to a critical awareness of our essential social-economic locations in a globalised world in fact what we remember is not only our empathy for others, but also our obligations towards others. Education helps us to realise that we are in no way socially isolated from remote others, but in fact intimately connected through the increasingly globalised world of economic trade. In fact, many of our relationships to seemingly remote others, upon analysis, are relations that are being built by forces which seem beyond our control, and that are so central to our lives that they become in fact invisible to us, and hide our interdependency as human beings to even the most poor and isolated of this world. At the same time, the capitalist and conservative political system feeds to us this myth of "independence" and "individual achievement" saying that to be succesful in this world, we must attain our goals through our sole and lonely efforts. Upon closer inspection that education for peace affords us, this cultural myth falls away as a mere lie at best, and at worst, a deception intended on the silencing of the role others have played in our lives to sustain us in order so that their efforts and labours can be more easily devalued and exploited. This is most easily understood through the example of food.

Food is an obvious necessity to human life and without it we die. Let's take the example of just one meal, breakfast. Living in Canada today, I decide that I will drink a cup of coffee, eat a banana, before running to a high-business powered meetings all morning long, celebrating the values of what my independence and individual hard work has brought me. My coffee and my bananas are most likely from Central America, produced by under-paid and non-land owning farmers who work at the pay of international corporations that own the mono-cultured land the Indigenous people once lived on. The monoculture agrriculture has lead to the degradation of the soil and water of the village that this particular banana is from, like so many other rural areas in Central America. The lack of land ownership means that the rural poor do not produce their own food, but must instead buy food from the hands of the same corporations that defend their right to use highly toxic chemicals for pesticides that have been put under international bans. These chemicals have been causing miscarraiges and disfigured births since the 1970s when they first started to be used-- in fact the case of international corporations such as Dole using banned chemicals is so old and well known to the "left" community that when I brought it up to one of my teachers as a point we needed to spread education on, he said "Really? We were advocating for a ban on Dole back in the 70s". But with the advent of increasing free-trade agreements that have been one of the hallmarks of globalisation, these bananas can get to Canadian markets easier than ever before.

Now let's imagine that I didn't make the coffee myself, but I bought it with the banana at a cafe. The young woman who is most statistically likely to sell me my coffee and banana in the new economy of our globalised era, is one of the many non-unionised, part-time, contract workers paid at minimum wage. She will not receive any kind of benefits from her employer and her job security is non-existant. This type of labour, especially in the service industry, is statistically on the rise in Canada and directly linked to the rise in dominance of a very few corporations who control the global access to food in the world; as global corporations come to control the ownership and distribution of food, the power of labour is degraded to a marginalised employment characterised by instability and low pay. This type of labour has been coined "McJobs" and are a characteristic of the changing face of the labour market in Canada and around the world and as you may have guessed, it does not represent a change for the better for so called unskilled labourers looking for work.

With this expanding understanding that education for peace brings us, a mindful individual who has began to understand the shape of the global forces within which his or her daily actions are operating is left with many questions. First, as Davidson-Harden suggests, he or she may be motivated with empathy for the plight of the plantation worker, whose underpaid labours have brought us in North America our sustenance of bananas and coffee at the expense of not only the worker's right livlihood, but also, at the expense of his or her entire community, through the degradation of water and soil that monoculture crops result in; and that is even without accounting for the emotional, physical, and economic cost of the illegal chemicals which disfigure children, blind and burn plantation workers, and cause miscarriages. I propose a second and equally appropriate response: that as people begin to understand their essential inter-dependence on the labours and efforts of others for even the most basic sustenance of our day-to-day lives that we become motivated also by our newly awakened sense of obligation to those whose lives enrich our own. It is time, as the Aboriginal Elder reminded us at the Equinox celebration, to cease being mere recipients of the blessings of bounty Mother Earth and her peoples have brought us, and to become active caretakers for the continued sustenance of both these groups.

The power of such a statement is profound and requires reflection before its many aspects can become clear. First, it represents a shift in understanding away from the North American ideal of individual achievement and towards a more accurate understanding of how the world actually works, where we come to understand that even the most basic elements of individual human survival depend upon the generous contributions and hard work of diverse others (including a functional ecosystem). This understanding of our essential human condition enables us to challenge policies that debase and degrade people and the environment through the powerful tool of simple recognition. This recognition of the contribution of others also implies that the people and the environment who provides for us deserve to be respected in order for such contributions to be sustained long into the future. Such recognition enables us to imagine the world in a new way and imagine solutions to global problems in a new way. Suddenly, the isolation and alienation many feel as North Americans fades away as we come to see that every aspect of our lives touches other peoples lives and is sustained by others. We are able to imagine new ways of being inter-dependent together rather than the current system of exploitation, degradation and silencing of the voices of those who bring us our daily bread.